Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography
by greenovalfruit
Summary: The mock turtle is a curious creature. To be something yourself, but that an imitation of another, what does it mean to be oneself? slight Alice AU :: Review please!


The mock turtle hunched further over his task, adjusting the ruler ever so slightly before executing the final line. He was still for a moment, only his eyes darting across the surface, looking for any kind of inconsistency, sliding over his numbers in search of a mathematical error. But this creation was as close to perfect as it would come and he leaned back in his chair with a sigh.

As his shadow drew away from the desk, a wonderful pattern was revealed in the lamplight. Rosettes and complex intersections, shapes within shapes within shapes, a roughly hewn mandala stood out from the rock. Or at least, it would. Once the mock turtle began to pick the pattern out with his tools. For now, the sacred geometry lay flat and still under the warm glow of the lamp.

He stood to make some tea, and perhaps warm a pan of soup. Time moving as it does, it was getting late and a mock turtle cannot survive on tea alone. He made his way towards the kitchen, which wasn't very far as the small, sandy cave he lived in did not extend deep into the coast. He stopped before an archway that lead from his study and living room to the kitchen and a modest assortment of other spaces where he kept trowels and beekeeper's helmets and stacks upon stacks of books, which he greatly enjoyed nibbling on one by one as a source of fibre.

There was a space over the archway, left when a mangrove above ground was swept away in a storm and its roots torn clean from the earth. The mock turtle spent that miserable night with a large saucepan below the hole in his ceiling, wrapped in a blanket, mumbling about insurance and the price of fish. But the damage was quickly mended and now the only evidence that tree roots had ever been there was a small hollow that appeared to be waiting for something. This had not escaped the mock turtle and it was the new tenant of this space that he had set about creating.

He continued into the kitchen and set the kettle on the hob, filling a small pan with evening soup to warm by its side. He stirred the sea green liquid with a heavy spoon that he carefully cleaned and placed upon the shelf. It was one of his most prized possessions, this spoon. And here is why.

It was made of the most peculiar material, which had only ever been found on this craggy length of coastline, naturally occurring within great boulders and glinting in broken pieces amongst the shale. It was a fine granite-like compound, as far as the mock turtle could make out, made up of quartz and basalt and strangely interacting micas. These things could be found in abundance around his home, half buried in the earth or strewn between rocky outcroppings. But this material seemed to take facets of all of those substances and rearrange them into a new kind of rock. He admired the way the spoon seemed to glow and change colours of its own accord in the flickering firelight of the kitchen. He thought more on the rock as he prepared his tea and poured his soup into a polished silver tureen.

If it was indeed created by a melding of natural elements, as the mock turtle suspected, there was no wonder that he found so few of the larger pieces. The pressure required for each structure to rearrange itself with the others would be fantastic and he supposed it was unlikely for great portions of stone to survive this process without cracking. Still, when he was young, he had found a chunk buried in the sand and carved his precious spoon. And now, many years since he had discovered the striking slab of rock in a pool by the shore, it was to fill its proper place in his home.

He carried his tea and his supper back into the study, setting it down on a table by his desk. He cast an eye habitually over the lead marked stone, following the stars and the hexagons as they traced their way between hidden leaves and tiny buds. His mind followed a familiar path back to the question that seemed as connected to the patterns he created as each shape relied on the previous to exist – why not a simple turtle?

A mock turtle all his life (on occasion, in his youth, he had lied and said he was a real turtle once), he could never understand what exactly made him different. What seemed to separate him from Being. And he fancied that perhaps the drawings he made, the small carvings he created, would somehow allow him an answer through their divinity. Perfectly calculated and ruled, they were an expression of undeniable Truth, nothing mock about them. He lived in the hope that one final line, one algorithm completed, would bring him to some kind of union with the One and he could cast off the 'mock' like a cracked shell. To be a real turtle.

And maybe this crowning piece, set above a doorway in his home, would be the one that allowed him refuge from otherness, from half life. For all he ever wanted was to be what he was. Surely a lofty goal for a simple mock turtle.


End file.
